Posts Tagged ‘vmware’

In part 1 of the series we looked at the Management Portal deployment. Let’s move on to an overview of the portal functionality.

Portal Dashboard

Once you open the portal you are asked to pick your region (region preferences can later be changed only from Web Client). You then proceed to the dashboard where you can see all instances you already have running in AWS. If you don’t see your VPCs, make sure the user you’re using to log in is on the list of administrators in AMP (user and domain names are case sensitive).

Here you can find detailed configuration information of each instance (Summary page), performance metrics (pulled from CloudWatch) and do some simple tasks, such as stopping/rebooting/terminating an instance, creating an AMI (Amazon Machine Image). You can also generate a Windows password from a key pair if you need to connect to VM via RDP or SSH.

Virtual Private Cloud Configuration

If the dashboard tab is more operational-focused, VPC tab is configuration-centric. Here you can create new VPCs, subnets and security groups. This can be handy if you want to add a rule to a security group to for instance allow RDP access to AWS instances from a certain IP.

If you spend most of the time in vCenter this can be helpful as you don’t need to go to AWS console every time to perform such simple day to day tasks.

Virtual Machine Provisioning

Portal supports simple instance provisioning from Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). You start with creating an environment (Default Environment can’t be used to deploy new instances). Then you create a template, where you can pick an AMI and specify configuration options, such as instance type, subnets and security groups.

Note: when creating a template, make sure to search for AMIs by AMI ID. AMI IDs in quick start list are not up-to-date and will cause instance deployment to fail with the following error:

Failed to launch instance due to EC2 error: The specified AMI is no longer available or you are not authorized to use it.

You can then go ahead and deploy an instance from a template.

Virtual Machine Migration

Saving the best for the last. VM migration – this is probably one of the coolest portal features. Right-click on a VM in vCenter inventory and select Migrate to EC2. You will be asked where you want to place the VM and how AWS instance should be configured.

When you hit the button AMP will first export VM as an OVF image and then upload the image to AWS. As a result, you get a copy of your VM in AWS VPC with minimal effort.

When it comes to VM migration to AWS, there is, of course, much more to it than just copying the data. Machine gets a new SID, which not all applications and services like. There are compatibility considerations, data gravity, network connectivity and others. But all the heavy lifting AMP does for you.

Conclusion

I can’t say that I was overly impressed with the tool, it’s very basic and somewhat limited. Security Groups can be created, but cannot be applied to running instances. Similarly, templates can be created, but not edited.

But I would still recommend to give it a go. Maybe you will find it useful in your day to day operations. It gives you visibility into your AWS environment, saving time jumping between two management consoles. And don’t underestimate the migration feature. Where other vendors ask for a premium, AWS Management Portal for vCenter gives it to you for free.

Cloud has been a hot topic in IT for quite a while, for such valid reasons and benefits it brings as agility and economies of scale. More and more customers start to embark on the cloud journey, whether it’s DR to cloud, using cloud as a Tier 3 storage or even full production migrations for the purpose of shrinking the physical data center footprint.

Even though full data center migrations to cloud are not that uncommon, many customers use cloud for certain use cases and keep other more static workloads on-premises, where it may be more cost-effective. What it means is that they end up having two environments, that they have to manage separately. This introduces complexity into operational models as each environment has its own management tools.

Overview

AWS Management Portal for vCenter helps to bridge this gap by connecting your on-premises vSphere environment to AWS and letting you perform basic management tasks, such as creating VPCs and security groups, deploying EC2 instances from AMI templates and even migrating VMs from vSphere to cloud, all without leaving the familiar vCenter user interface.

Solution consists of two components: AWS Management Portal for vCenter, which is configured in AWS and AWS Connector for vCenter, which is a Linux appliance deployed on-prem. Let’s start with the management portal first.

Configure Management Portal

AWS Management Portal for vCenter or simply AMP, can be accessed by the following link https://amp.aws.amazon.com. Configuration is wizard-based and its main purpose is to set up authentication for vCenter users to be able to access AWS cloud through the portal.

You have an option of either using SAML, which has pre-requisites, or simply choosing the connector to be your authentication provider, which is the easiest option.

If you choose the latter, you will need to pre-configure a trust relationship between AWS Connector and the portal. First step of the process is to create an Identity and Access Management (IAM) user in AWS Management Console and assign “AWSConnector” IAM policy to it (connector will then use this account to authenticate to AWS). This step is explained in detail in Option 1: Federation Authentication Proxy section of the AWS Management Portal for vCenter User Guide.

You will also be asked to specify vCenter accounts that will have access to AWS and to generate an AMP-Connector Key. Save your IAM account Access Key / Secret and AMP-Connector Key. You will need them in AWS Connector registration wizard.

To assign a static IP address to the appliance you will need to open VM console and log in as ec2-user with the password ec2pass. Run the setup script and change network settings as desired. Connector also supports connecting to AWS through a proxy if required.

# sudo setup.rb

Browse to the appliance IP address to link AWS Connector to your vCenter and set up appliance’s password. You will then be presented with the registration wizard.

Wizard will ask you to provide a service account for AWS Connector (create a non-privileged domain account for it) and credentials of the IAM trust account you created previously. You will also need your trust role’s ARN (not user’s ARN) which you can get from the AMP-Connector Federation Proxy section of AWS Management Portal for vCenter setup page.

If everything is done correctly, you will get to the plug-in registration page with the configuration summary, which will look similar to this:

Summary

AWS Connector will register a vCenter plug-in, which you will see both in vSphere client and Web Client.

That completes the deployment part. In the next blog post of the series we will talk in more detail on how AWS Management Portal can be leveraged to manage VPCs and EC2 instances.

Last time I made a blog post on initial configuration of Force10 switches, which you can find here. There I talked about firmware upgrade and basic features, such as STP and Flow Control. In this blog post I would like to touch on such a key feature of Force10 switches as Virtual Link Trunking (VLT).

VLT is Force10’s implementation of Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation Group (MLAG), which is similar to Virtual Port Channels (vPC) on Cisco Nexus switches. The goal of VLT is to let you establish one aggregated link to two physical network switches in a loop-free topology. As opposed to two standalone switches, where this is not possible.

You could say that switch stacking gives you similar capabilities and you would be right. The issue with stacked switches, though, is that they act as a single switch not only from the data plane point of view, but also from the control plane point of view. The implication of this is that if you need to upgrade a switch stack, you have to reboot both switches at the same time, which brings down your network. If you have an iSCSI or NFS storage array connected to the stack, this may cause trouble, especially in enterprise environments.

With VLT you also have one data plane, but individual control planes. As a result, each switch can be managed and upgraded separately without full network downtime.

VLT Terminology

Virtual Link Trunking uses the following set of terms:

VLT peer – one of the two switches participating in VLT (you can have a maximum of two switches in a VLT domain)

VLT interconnect (VLTi) – interconnect link between the two switches to synchronize the MAC address tables and other VLT-related data

VLT backup link – heartbeat link to send keep alive messages between the two switches, it’s also used to identify switch state if VLTi link fails

VLT – this is the name of the feature – Virtual Link Trunking, as well as a VLT link aggregation group – Virtual Link Trunk. We will call aggregated link a VLT LAG to avoid ambiguity.

VLT domain – grouping of all of the above

VLT Topology

This’s what a sample VLT domain looks like. S4048-ON switches have six 40Gb QSFP+ ports, two of which we use for a VLT interconnect. It’s recommended to use a static LAG for VLTi.

Two 1Gb links are used for VLT backup. You can use switch out-of-band management ports for this. Four 10Gb links form a VLT LAG to the upstream core switch.

Use Cases

So where is this actually helpful? Vast majority of today’s environments are virtualized and do not require LAGs. vSphere already uses teaming on vSwitch uplinks for traffic distribution across all network ports by default. There are some use cases in VMware environments, where you can create a LAG to a vSphere Distributed Switch for faster link failure convergence or improved packet switching. Unless you have a really large vSphere environment this is generally not required, but you may use this option later on if required. Read Chris Wahl’s blog post here for more info.

Where VLT is really helpful is in building a loop-free network topology in your datacenter. See, all your vSphere hosts are connected to both Force10 switches for redundancy. Since traffic comes to either of the switches depending on which uplink is being picked on a ESXi host, you have to make sure that VMs on switch 1 are able to communicate to VMs on switch 2. If all you had in your environment were two Force10 switches, you would establish a LAG between the two and be done with it. But if your network topology is a bit larger than this and you have at least a single additional core switch/router in your environment you’d be faced with the following dilemma. How can you ensure efficient traffic switching in your network without creating loops?

You can no longer create a LAG between the two Force10 switches, as it will create a loop. Your only option is to keep switches connected only to the core and not to each other. And by doing that you will cause all traffic from VMs on switch 1 destined to VMs on switch 2 and vise versa to traverse the core.

And that’s where VLT comes into play. All east-west traffic between servers is contained within the VLT domain and doesn’t need to traverse the core. As shown above, if we didn’t use VLT, traffic from one switch to another would have to go from switch 1 to core and then back from core to switch 2. In a VLT domain traffic between the switches goes directly form switch 1 to switch 2 using VLTi.

Conclusion

That’s a brief introduction to VLT theory. In the next few posts we will look at how exactly VLT is configured and map theory to practice.

If you happen to have your vSphere cluster to be licensed with Enterprise Plus edition, you may be aware of some of the advanced storage management features it includes, such as Storage DRS and Profile-Driven Storage.

These two features work together to let you optimise VM distribution between multiple VMware datastores from capability, capacity and latency perspective, much like DRS does for memory and compute. But they have some interoperability limitations, which I want to discuss in this post.

Datastore Clusters

In simple terms, datastore cluster is a collection of multiple datastores, which can be seen as a single entity from VM provisioning perspective.

VMware poses certain requirements for datastore clustes, but in my opinion the most important one is this:

Datastore clusters must contain similar or interchangeable datastores.

In other words, all of the datastores within a datastore cluster should have the same performance properties. You should not mix datastores provisioned on SSD tier with datastores on SAS and SATA tier and vise versa. The reason why is simple. Datastore clusters are used by SDRS to load-balance VMs between the datastores of a datastore cluster. DRS balances VMs based on datastore capacity and I/O latency only and is not storage capability aware. If you had SSD, SAS and SATA datastores all under the same cluster, SDRS would simply move all VMs to SSD-backed datastores, because it has the lowest latency and leave SAS and SATA empty, which makes little sense.

Design Decision 1:

If you have several datastores with the same performance characteristics, combine them all in a datastore cluster. Do not mix datastores from different arrays or array storage tiers in one datastore cluster. Datastore clusters is not a storage tiering solution.

Storage DRS

As already mentioned, SDRS is a feature, which when enabled on a datastore cluster level, lets you automatically (or manually) distribute VMs between datastores based on datastore storage utilization and I/O latency basis. VM placement recommendations and datastore maintenance mode are amongst other useful features of SDRS.

Quite often SDRS is perceived as a feature that can work with Profile-Driven Storage to enforce VM Storage Policy compliance. One of the scenarios, that is often brought up is what if there’s a VM with multiple .vmdk disks. Each disk has a certain storage capability. Mistakenly one of the disks has been storage vMotion’ed to a datastore, which does not meet the storage capability requirements. Can SDRS automatically move the disk back to a compliant datastore or notify that VM is not compliant? The answer is – no. SDRS does not take storage capabilities into account and make decisions only based on capacity and latency. This may be implemented in future versions, but is not supported in vSphere 5.

Design Decision 2:

Use datastore clusters in conjunction with Storage DRS to get the benefit of VM load-balancing and placement recommendations. SDRS is not storage capability aware and cannot enforce VM Storage Policy compliance.

Profile-Driven Storage

So if SDRS and datastore clusters are not capable of supporting multiple tiers of storage, then what does? Profile-Driven Storage is aimed exactly for that. You can assign user-defined or system-defined storage capabilities to a datastore and then create a VM Storage Policy and assign it to a VM. VM Storage Policy includes the list of required storage capabilities and only those datastores that mach them, will be suggested as a target for the VM that is assigned to that policy.

You can create storage capabilities manually, such as SSD, SAS, SATA. Or more abstract, such as Bronze, Silver and Gold and assign them to corresponding datastores. Or you can leverage VASA, which automatically assigns corresponding storage capabilities. Below is an example of a datastore connected from a Dell Compellent storage array.

You can then use storage capabilities from the VASA provider to create VM Storage Policies and assign them to VMs accordingly.

Design Decision 3:

If you have more than one datastore storage type, use Profile-Driven Storage to enforce VM placement based on VM storage requirements. VASA can simplify storage capabilities management.

Conclusion

If all of your datastores have the same performance characteristics, such as a number of LUNs auto-tiered on the storage array side, then one SDRS-enabled datastore cluster is a perfect solution for you.

But if your storage design is slightly more complex and you have datastores with different performance characteristics, such as SSD, SAS and SATA, leverage Profile-Driven Storage to control VM placement and enforce compliance. Just make sure to use a separate cluster for each tier of storage and you will get the most benefit out of vSphere Storage Policy-Based Management.

Recently I had an opportunity to work with Dell FX2 platform from the design and delivery point of view. I was deploying a FX2s chassis with FC630 blades and FN410S 10Gb I/O aggregators.

I ran into an interesting interoperability glitch between Force10 and vSphere distributed switch when using LLDP. LLDP is an equivalent of Cisco CDP, but is an open standard. And it allows vSphere administrators to determine which physical switch port a given vSphere distributed switch uplink is connected to. If you enable both Listen and Advertise modes, network administrators can get similar visibility, but from the physical switch side.

In my scenario, when LLDP was enabled on a vSphere distributed switch, uplinks on all ESXi hosts started disconnecting and connecting back intermittently, with log errors similar to this:

This clearly looks like some DCB negotiation issue between Force10 and the vSphere distributed switch.

Root Cause

Priority Flow Control (PFC) is one of the protocols from the Data Center Bridging (DCB) family. DCB was purposely built for converged network environments where you use 10Gb links for both Ethernet and FC traffic in the form of FCoE. In such scenario, PFC can pause Ethernet frames when FC is not having enough bandwidth and that way prioritise the latency sensitive storage traffic.

In my case NIC ports on Qlogic 57840 adaptors were used for 10Gb Ethernet and iSCSI and not FCoE (which is very uncommon unless you’re using Cisco UCS blade chassis). So the question is, why Force10 switches were trying to negotiate FCoE? And what did it have to do with enabling LLDP on the vDS?

The answer is simple. LLDP not only advertises the port numbers, but also the port capabilities. Data Center Bridging Exchange Protocol (DCBX) uses LLDP when conveying capabilities and configuration of FCoE features between neighbours. This is why enabling LLDP on the vDS triggered this. When Force10 switches determined that vDS uplinks were CNA adaptors (which was in fact true, I was just not using FCoE) it started to negotiate FCoE using DCBX. Which didn’t really go well.

Solution

The easiest solution to this problem is to disable DCB on the Force10 switches using the following command:

# conf t
# no dcb enable

Alternatively you can try and disable FCoE from the ESXi end by using the following commands from the host CLI:

# esxcli fcoe nic list
# esxcli fcoe nic disable -n vmnic0

Once FCoE has been disabled on all NICs, run the following command and you should get an empty list:

# esxcli fcoe adapter list

Conclusion

It is still not clear why PFC mismatch would cause vDS uplinks to start flapping. If switch cannot establish a FCoE connection it should just ignore it. Doesn’t seem to be the case on Force10. So if you run into a similar issue, simply disable DCB on the switches and it should fix it.

This seems like a straightforward topic. If you are on vSphere 6 you can create VMFS datastores and VM disks as big as 64TB (62TB for VM disks to be precise). The reality is, not all customers are running the latest and greatest for various reasons. The most common one is concerns about reliability. vSphere 6 is still at version 6.0. Once vSphere 6.1 comes out we will see wider adoption. At this stage I see various versions of vSphere 5 in the field. And even vSphere 4 at times, which is officially not supported by VMware since May 2015. So it’s not surprising I still get this question, what are the datastore and disk size limits for various vSphere versions?

Datastore size limit

The biggest datastore size for both VMFS3 and VMFS5 is 64TB. What you need to know is, VMFS3 file system uses MBR partition style, which is limited to 2TB. The way VMFS3 overcomes this limitation is by using extents. To extend VMFS3 partition to 64TB you would need 32 x 2TB LUNs on the storage array. VMFS5 file system has GPT partition style and can be extended to 64TB by expanding one underlying LUN without using extents, which is a big plus.

VMFS3 datastores are rare these days, unless you’re still on vSphere 4. The only consideration here is whether your vSphere 5 environment was a greenfield build. If the answer is yes, then all your datastores are VMFS5 already. If environment was upgraded from vSphere 4, you need to make sure all datastores have been upgraded (or better recreated) to VMFS5 as well. If the upgrade wasn’t done properly you may still have some VMFS3 datastores in your environment.

Disk size limit

For .vmdk disks the limitation had been 2TB for a long time, until VMware increased the limit to 62TB in vSphere 5.5. So if all of your datastores are VMFS5, this means you still have 2TB .vmdk limitation if you’re on 5.0 or 5.1.

For VMFS3 file system you also had an option to choose block size – 1MB, 2MB, 4MB or 8MB. 2TB .vmdk disks were supported only with the 8MB block size. The default was 1MB. So if you chose the default block size during datastore creation you were limited to 256GB .vmdk disks.

The above limits led to proliferation of Raw Device Mapping disks in many pre 5.5 environments. Those customers who needed VM disks bigger than 2TB had to use RDMs, as physical RDMs starting from VMFS5 supported 64TB (pRDMs on VMFS3 were still limited to 2TB).

This table summarises storage configuration maximums for vSphere version 4.0 to 6.0:

vSphere

Datastore Size

VMDK Size

pRDM Size

4.0

64TB

2TB

2TB

4.1

64TB

2TB

2TB

5.0

64TB

2TB

64TB

5.1

64TB

2TB

64TB

5.5

64TB

62TB

64TB

6.0

64TB

64TB

64TB

Summary

The bottom line is, if you’re on vSphere 5.5 or 6.0 and all your datastores are VMFS5 you can forget about the legacy .vmdk disk size limitations. And if you’re not on vSphere 5.5 you should consider upgrading as soon as possible, as vSphere 5.0 and 5.1 are coming to an end of support on 24 of August 2016.

Dell Compellent is Dell’s flagship storage array which competes in the market with such rivals as EMC VNX and NetApp FAS. All these products have slightly different storage architectures. In this blog post I want to discuss what distinguishes Dell Compellent from the aforementioned arrays when it comes to multipathing and failover. This may help you make right decisions when designing and installing a solution based on Dell Compellent in your production environment.

Compellent Array Architecture

In one of my previous posts I showed how Compellent LUNs on vSphere ESXi hosts are claimed by VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA instead of VMW_SATP_ALUA SATP, which is the default for all ALUA arrays. This happens because Compellent is not actually an ALUA array and doesn’t have the tpgs_on option enabled. Let’s digress for a minute and talk about what the tpgs_on option actually is.

For a storage array to be claimed by VMW_SATP_ALUA it has to have the tpgs_on option enabled, as indicated by the corresponding SATP claim rule:

A target port group is defined as a set of target ports that are in the same target port asymmetric access state at all times. A target port group asymmetric access state is defined as the target port asymmetric access state common to the set of target ports in a target port group. The grouping of target ports is vendor specific.

This has to do with how ports on storage controllers are grouped. On an ALUA array even though a LUN can be accessed through either of the controllers, paths only to one of them (controller which owns the LUN) are Active Optimized (AO) and paths to the other controller (non-owner) are Active Non-Optimized (ANO).

Compellent does not present LUNs through the non-owning controller. You can easily see that if you go to the LUN properties. In this example we have four iSCSI ports connected (two per controller) on the Compellent side, but we can see only two paths, which are the paths from the owning controller.

If Compellent presents each particular LUN only through one controller, then how does it implement failover? Compellent uses a concept of fault domains and control ports to handle LUN failover between controllers.

Compellent Fault Domains

This is Dell’s definition of a Fault Domain:

Fault domains group front-end ports that are connected to the same Fibre Channel fabric or Ethernet network. Ports that belong to the same fault domain can fail over to each other because they have the same connectivity.

So depending on how you decided to go about your iSCSI network configuration you can have one iSCSI subnet / one fault domain / one control port or two iSCSI subnets / two fault domains / two control ports. Either of the designs work fine, this is really is just a matter of preference.

You can think of a Control Port as a Virtual IP (VIP) for the particular iSCSI subnet. When you’re setting up iSCSI connectivity to a Compellent, you specify Control Ports IPs in Dynamic Discovery section of the iSCSI adapter properties. Which then redirects the traffic to the actual controller IPs.

If you go to the Storage Center GUI you will see that Compellent also creates one virtual port for every iSCSI physical port. This is what’s called a Virtual Port Mode and is recommended instead of a Physical Port Mode, which is the default setting during the array initialization.

Failover scenarios

Now that we now what fault domains are, let’s talk about the different failover scenarios. Failover can happen on either a port level when you have a transceiver / cable failure or a controller level, when the whole controller goes down or is rebooted. Let’s discuss all of these scenarios and their variations one by one.

1. One Port Failed / One Fault Domain

If you use one iSCSI subnet and hence one fault domain, when you have a port failure, Compellent will move the failed port to the other port on the same controller within the same fault domain.

In this example, 5000D31000B48B0E and 5000D31000B48B0D are physical ports and 5000D31000B48B1D and 5000D31000B48B1C are the corresponding virtual ports on the first controller. Physical port 5000D31000B48B0E fails. Since both ports on the controller are in the same fault domain, controller moves virtual port 5000D31000B48B1D from its original physical port 5000D31000B48B0E to the physical port 5000D31000B48B0D, which still has connection to network. In the background Compellent uses iSCSI redirect command on the Control Port to move the traffic to the new virtual port location.

2. One Port Failed / Two Fault Domains

Two fault domains scenario is slightly different as now on each controller there’s only one port in each fault domain. If any of the ports were to fail, controller would not fail over the port. Port is failed over only within the same controller/domain. Since there’s no second port in the same fault domain, the virtual port stays down.

A distinction needs to be made between the physical and virtual ports here. Because from the physical perspective you lose one physical link in both One Fault Domain and Two Fault Domains scenarios. The only difference is, since in the latter case the virtual port is not moved, you’ll see one path down when you go to LUN properties on an ESXi host.

3. Two Ports Failed

This is the scenario which you have to be careful with. Compellent does not initiate a controller failover when all front-end ports on a controller fail. The end result – all LUNs owned by this controller become unavailable.

This is the price Compellent pays for not supporting ALUA. However, such scenario is very unlikely to happen in a properly designed solution. If you have two redundant network switches and controllers are cross-connected to both of them, if one switch fails you lose only one link per controller and all LUNs stay accessible through the remaining links/switch.

4. Controller Failed / Rebooted

If the whole controller fails the ports are failed over in a similar fashion. But now, instead of moving ports within the controller, ports are moved across controllers and LUNs come across with them. You can see how all virtual ports have been failed over from the second (failed) to the first (survived) controller:

Once the second controller gets back online, you will need to rebalance the ports or in other words move them back to the original controller. This doesn’t happen automatically. Compellent will either show you a pop up window or you can do that by going to System > Setup > Multi-Controller > Rebalance Local Ports.

Conclusion

Dell Compellent is not an ALUA storage array and falls into the category of Active/Passive arrays from the LUN access perspective. Under such architecture both controller can service I/O, but each particular LUN can be accessed only through one controller. This is different from the ALUA arrays, where LUN can be accessed from both controllers, but paths are active optimized on the owning controller and active non-optimized on the non-owning controller.

From the end user perspective it does not make much of a difference. As we’ve seen, Compellent can handle failover on both port and controller levels. The only exception is, Compellent doesn’t failover a controller if it loses all front-end connectivity, but this issue can be easily avoided by properly designing iSCSI network and making sure that both controllers are connected to two upstream switches in a redundant fashion.

Cisco UCS has been in the market for seven years now. It was quite expensive blade chassis when it was first introduced by Cisco in March 2009, but has reached the price parity with most of the server vendors these days.

Over the course of the last seven years Cisco has built a great set of products, which helps UCS customers in various areas:

UCS Director for infrastructure automation not only of UCS, but also network, storage and virtualization layers (don’t expect it to support any other vendors than Cisco for IP networks, though)

UCS Performance Manager for performance monitoring and capacity planning, which can also tap into your network, storage, virtualization and even individual virtual machines

UCS Performance Manager

UCS Performance Manager was first released in October 2014. The product comes in two versions – full and express. PM Express covers only servers, hypervisors and operating systems. The full version on top of that supports storage and network devices. Product is licensed on a per UCS server basis. So you don’t pay for additional network/storage devices or hypervisors.

PM supports vSphere hypervisor (plus Hyper-V), Cisco networking and EMC VNX / EMC VMAX / NetApp FAS storage arrays. By the list of the supported products you may quickly guess that the full version of Performance Manager is targeted mainly at NetApp FlexPod, VCE Vblock and EMC VSPEX customers.

Product architecture

UCS Performance Manager can be downloaded and quickly deployed as a virtual appliance. You might be shocked when you start it up first time, as the appliance by default comes configured with 8 vCPUs and 40GB of RAM. If you’re using it for demo purposes you can safely reduce it to something like 2-4 vCPUs and 8-12GB of RAM. You will experience some slowdowns during the startup, but performance will be acceptable overall.

UCS PM is built on Zenoss monitoring software and is essentially a customized version of Zenoss Service Dynamics with Cisco UCS ZenPacks. You may notice references to Zenoss throughout the management GUI.

Two main components of the solution are the Control Center and the Performance Manager itself. Control Center is a container orchestration product, which runs Performance Manager as an application in Docker containers (many containers).

When deploying Performance Manager you start with one VM and then you can scale to up to four VMs total. Each of the VMs can run in two modes – master or agent. When you deploy the first VM you will have to select it’s role at first login. You have to have one master host, which also runs an agent. And if you need to scale you can deploy three additional agent VMs and build a ZooKeeper cluster. One master host can support up to 500 UCS servers, when configured with 8 vCPUs and 64GB of RAM. Depending on your deployment size you may not ever need to scale to more than one Performance Manager VM.

Installation

After you’ve deployed the OVA you will need to log in to the VM’s CLI and change the password, configure the host as a master, set up a static IP, DNS, time zone, hostname and reboot.

Then you connect to Control Center and click “+ Application” button in the Applications section and deploy UCS PM on port 4979. For the hostname use Control Center’s hostname.

Once the UCS PM application is deployed, click on the Start button next to UCS PM line in the Applications section

Performance manager is accessible from a separate link which is Control Center’s hostname prefixed with “ucspm”. So if your CC hostname is ucspm01.domain.local, UCS PM link will be https://ucspm.ucspm01.domain.local:443. You can see it in Virtual Host Names column. You will have to add an alias in DNS which would point from ucspm.ucspm01.domain.local to ucspm01.domain.local, otherwise you won’t be able to connect to it.

When you finally open UCS PM you will see a wizard which will ask you to add the licences, set an admin account and add your UCS chassis, VMware vCenters and UCS Central if you happen to have one. In the full version you will have a chance to add storage and network devices as well.

UCS performance monitoring

Probably the easiest way to start working with Performance Manager is to jump from the dashboard to the Topology view. Topology view shows your UCS domain topology and provides an easy way to look at various components from one screen.

Click on the fabric interconnect and you can quickly see the uplink utilization. Click on the chassis and you will get summarized FEX port statistics. How about drilling down to a particular port-channel or service profile or vNIC? UCS Performance Manager can give you the most comprehensive information about every UCS component with historical data up to 1 year based on the default storage configuration.

Another great feature you may want to straight away drill down into is Bandwidth Usage, which gives you an overview of bandwidth utilization across all UCS components, which you can look at from a server or network perspective. This can let you quickly identify such things as uneven workload distribution between the blades or maybe uneven traffic distribution between fabric interconnect A and B side or SAN/LAN uplinks going to the upstream switches.

You can of course also generate various reports to determine your total capacity utilization or if you’re for example planning to add memory to your blades, you can quickly find out the number of DIMM slots available in the corresponding report.

VMware performance monitoring

UCS Performance Manager is not limited to monitoring only Cisco UCS blade chassis even in the Express version. You can add your hypervisors and also individual virtual machines. Once you add your vCenter to the list of the monitored devices you get a comprehensive list of VMware components, such as hosts, VMs, datastores, pNICs, vNICs and associated performance monitoring graphs, configuration information, events, etc.

Performance Manager can correlate VMware to UCS components and for example for a given VM provide you FC uplink utilization on the corresponding fabric interconnects of the chassis where this VM is running:

If you want to go further, you can add individual VMs to Performance Manager, connected via WinRM/SSH or SNMP. Some cool additional functionality you get, which is not available in VMware section is the Dynamic View. Dynamic View lets you see VM connectivity from the ESXi host it’s running on all the way through to blade, chassis, vNIC, VIC, backplane port, I/O module and fabric interconnect. Which is very helpful for troubleshooting connectivity issues:

Conclusion

UCS Performance Manager is not the only product for performance monitoring in virtualized environments. There are many others, VMware vRealize Operations Manager is one of the most popular of its kind. But if you’re a Cisco UCS customer you can definitely benefit from the rich functionality this product offers for monitoring UCS blade chassis. And if you are a lucky owner of NetApp FlexPod, VCE Vblock or EMC VSPEX, UCS Performance Manager for you is a must.

There is a moment in every vSphere admin’s life when he faces vSphere Admission Control. Quite often this moment is not the most pleasant one. In one of my previous posts I talked about some of the common issues that Admission Control may cause and how to avoid them. And quite frankly Admission Control seems to do more harm than good in most vSphere environments.

Admission Control is a vSphere feature that is built to make sure that VMs with reservations can be restarted in a cluster if one of the cluster hosts fails. “Reservations” is the key word here. There is a common belief that Admission Control protects all other VMs as well, but that’s not true.

Let me go through all three vSphere Admission Control policies and explain why you’re better of disabling Admission Control altogether, as all of these policies give you little to no benefit.

Host failures cluster tolerates

This policy is the default when you deploy a vSphere cluster and policy which causes the most issues. “Host failures cluster tolerates” uses slots to determine if a VM is allowed to be powered on in a cluster. Depending on whether VM has CPU and memory reservations configured it can use one or more slots.

Slot Size

To determine the total number of slots for a cluster, Admission Control uses slot size. Slot size is either the default 32MHz and 128MB of RAM (for vSphere 6) or if you have VMs in the cluster configured with reservations, then the slot size will be calculated based on the maximum CPU/memory reservation. So say if you have 100 VMs, 98 of which have no reservations, one VM has 2 vCPUs and 8GB of memory reserved and another VM has 4 vCPUs and 4GB of memory reserved, then the slot size will jump from 32MHz / 128MB to 4 vCPUs / 8GB of memory. If you have 2.0 GHz CPUs on your hosts, the 4 vCPU reservation will be an equivalent of 8.0 GHz.

Total Number of Slots

Now that we know the slot size, which happens to be 8.0 GHz and 8GB of memory, we can calculate the total number of slots in the cluster. If you have 2 x 8 core CPUs and 256GB of RAM in each of 4 ESXi hosts, then your total amount of resources is 16 cores x 2.0 GHz x 4 hosts = 128 GHz and 256GB x 4 hosts = 1TB of RAM. If your slot size is 4 vCPUs and 8GB of RAM, you get 64 vCPUs / 4 vCPUs = 16 slots (you’ll get more for memory, but the least common denominator has to be used).

Practical Use

Now if you configure to tolerate one host failure, you have to subtract four slots from the total number. Every VM, even if it doesn’t have reservations takes up one slot. And as a result you can power on maximum 12 VMs on your cluster. How does that sound?

Such incredibly restrictive behaviour is the reason why almost no one uses it in production. Unless it’s left there by default. You can manually change the slot size, but I have no knowledge of an approach one would use to determine the slot size. That’s the policy number one.

Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity

This is the second policy, which is commonly recommended by most to use instead of the restrictive “Host failures cluster tolerates”. This policy uses percentage-based instead of the slot-based admission.

It’s much more straightforward, you simply specify the percentage of resources you want to reserve. For example if you have four hosts in a cluster the common belief is that if you specify 25% of CPU and memory, they’ll be reserved to restart VMs in case one of the hosts fail. But it won’t. Here’s the reason why.

When calculating amount of free resources in a cluster, Admission Control takes into account only VM reservations and memory overhead. If you have no VMs with reservations in your cluster then HA will be showing close to 99% of free resources even if you’re running 200 VMs.

For instance, if all of your VMs have 4 vCPUs and 8GB of RAM, then memory overhead would be 60.67MB per VM. For 300 VMs it’s roughly 18GB. If you have two VMs with reservations, say one VM with 2 vCPUs / 4GB of RAM and another VM with 4 vCPUs / 2GB of RAM, then you’ll need to add up your reservations as well.

So if we consider memory, it’s 18GB + 4GB + 2GB = 24GB. If you have the total of 1TB of RAM in your cluster, Admission Control will consider 97% of your memory resources being free.

For such approach to work you’d need to configure reservations on 100% of your VMs. Which obviously no one would do. So that’s the policy number two.

Specify failover hosts

This is the third policy, which typically is the least recommended, because it dedicates a host (or multiple hosts) specifically just for failover. You cannot run VMs on such hosts. If you try to vMotion a VM to it, you’ll get an error.

In my opinion, this policy would actually be the most useful for reserving cluster resources. You want to have N+1 redundancy, then reserve it. This policy does exactly that.

Conclusion

When it comes to vSphere Admission Control, everyone knows that “Host failures cluster tolerates” policy uses slot-based admission and is better to be avoided.

There’s a common misconception, though, that “Percentage of cluster resources reserved as failover spare capacity” is more useful and can reserve CPU and memory capacity for host failover. But in reality it’ll let you run as many VMs as you want and utilize all of your cluster resources, except for the tiny amount of CPU and memory for a handful of VMs with reservations you may have in your environment.

If you want to reserve failover capacity in your cluster, either use “Specify failover hosts” policy or simply disable Admission Control and keep an eye on your cluster resource utilization manually (or using vROps) to make sure you always have room for growth.

If you’ve ever worked with Dell Compellent storage arrays you may have noticed that when you initially connect it to a VMware ESXi host, by default VMware Native Multipathing Plugin (NMP) uses Fixed Path Selection Policy (PSP) for all connected LUNs. And if you have two ports on each of the controllers connected to your storage area network (be it iSCSI or FC), then you’re wasting half of your bandwidth.

Why does that happen? Let’s dig deep into VMware’s Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) and see how it treats Compellent.

How Compellent is claimed by VMware NMP

If you are familiar with vSphere’s Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) and NMP (which is the only PSA plug-in that every ESXi host has installed by default), then you may know that historically it’s always had specific rules for such Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA) arrays as NetApp FAS and EMC VNX.

Run the following command on an ESXi host and you will see claim rules for NetApp and DGC devices (DGC is Data General Corporation, which built Clariion array that has been later re-branded as VNX by EMC):

This tells NMP to use Round-Robin Path Selection Policy (PSP) for these arrays, which is always preferable if you want to utilize all available active-optimized paths. You may have noticed that there’s no default PSP in the VNX claim rule, but if you look at the default PSP for the VMW_SATP_ALUA_CX Storage Array Type Plug-In (SATP), you’ll see that it’s also Round-Robin:

Compellent is not an ALUA storage array and doesn’t have the tpgs_on option enabled. As a result it’s claimed by the VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA rule for the iSCSI transport, which is why you end up with the Fixed path selection policy for all LUNs by default.

Changing the default PSP

Now let’s see how we can change the PSP from Fixed to Round Robin. First thing you have to do before even attempting to change the PSP is to check VMware Compatibility List to make sure that the round robin PSP is supported for a particular array and vSphere combination.

As you can see, round robin path selection policy is supported for Dell Compellent storage arrays in vSphere 6.0u2. So let’s change it to get the benefit of being able to simultaneously use all paths to Compellent controllers.

For Compellent firmware versions 6.5 and earlier use the following command to change the default PSP:

# esxcli storage nmp satp set -P VMW_PSP_RR -s VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA

Note: technically here you’re changing PSP not specifically for the Compellent storage array, but for any array which is claimed by VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA and which also doesn’t have an individual SATP rule with PSP set. Make sure that this is not the case or you may accidentally change PSP for some other array you may have in your environment.

The above will change PSP for any newly provisioned and connected LUNs. For any existing LUNs you can change PSP either manually in each LUN’s properties or run the following command in PowerCLI:

By default any LUN connected from a Dell Compellent storage array is claimed by NMP using Fixed path selection policy. You can change it to Round Robin using the above two simple commands to make sure you utilize all storage paths available to ESXi hosts.